Sunday, June 4, 2017

Paris, federal capital of the Planet

After the deplorable speech of Donald Trump announcing that the USA would leave the Paris agreement on climate change, for the first time a world leader has addressed all the international public opinion in the current lingua franca (English) to say clearly that it is everyone's obligation to "Make the Planet great again." Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election under what his rival Marine Le Pen called a radical federalist pro-European platform. It seems that Macron does not have enough, and actually he has global federalist ambitions. He will not be alone, and he deserves the support of all those who beleive that the nation-state is obsolete and that we should make progress towards shared sovereignty. France's environmental minister said that his country will redouble his efforts on climate change: "Hulot was speaking hours after U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed his plan to pull the world's second biggest carbon emitter out of the deal on the basis that it was bad for the American economy and would weaken its sovereignty.

"It's not dead. On the contrary France itself, rather than reduce its ambitions, will revise them upwards and we will pull along in our wake a number of other states," Hulot said on Europe 1 radio. "France intends to maintain and reinforce its diplomatic leadership on this subject."

Hulot is a well-known French environmentalist who was pulled into the new government of President Emmanuel Macron as a minister when it was formed less than three weeks ago." Perhaps Trump's announcement will have the unintended effect of uniting more people than before against climate change, similarly to the effect that the Brexit referendum had on many Europeans, who are now more determined to secure a more integrated Union.